Missing the Fluff in SWTOR and Sixth Memes

I’ve been going through a bit of a non-playing phase for the past week or two. Part of it is directly attributable to Supernatural appearing on Netflix Instant Watch — I heard the first five seasons are amazing and it really is quite addictive. Mostly, though, it’s just the natural cycle of things. Sometimes I don’t wanna MMO!

Honestly, I wish SWTOR had more fluff. It might in a few months, of course, and perhaps I am just misinformed about existing content, but I miss grinding pets and reputations and achievements. The newest RIFT event lets you work on currencies for a number of pets, including Rudi the Christmas Corgi, and while I certainly am not encouraging Bioware to introduce Space Christmas or Space Valentines or anything like that my Achiever nature would enjoy having similar projects to work on in SWTOR.

In retrospect one of the best things WoW ever added was also the simplest: seeing guildies’ achievements in guild chat. Yes, the Level 10 or 25 Fish Caught achievements were not great victories, but it helped connect us even when we weren’t grouped together. We could comment on the new alt, or mock a level 85 for finally levelling their professions. We could see and congratulate a character the first time they finished an instance or the raid group for killing a new boss.

In fact, the running list of achievements helped add a sense of action and bustle to guild chat even when we were all quiet and doing our separate thing on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

I appreciate that the SWTOR team is probably still putting out launch fires. They have bugs to squash and mechanics to nail down and big chunks of content to release, but I’m looking forward to the little things really. Give me pets, titles, and crazy mounts. Let me spend time working on something analogous to The Insane or classic Loremaster, titles/achievements that took months of effort done at an individual pace.

Many years ago in the days of TBC, one of my good friends decided that he didn’t care what his character was wearing as long as his stats were good. He infamously declared, “We’re not playing Dolly Dressup here!” And at the time, he was kinda right — our focus was raiding and preparing for raiding, and we liked it. In SWTOR, though, neither our guild now nor (I think) the developers are intending to focus on hardcore raiding. That void needs to be filled with something else beyond brown robes and identical speeders.

Basically what I’m saying is: tauntaun mount now, please. :)

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I was tagged by Logtar yesterday for the sixth image meme that’s been going around, and I cannot ignore a good meme. I cheated a bit though and included the sixth image in my folders for WoW, RIFT, and SWTOR.

Sadly my WoW screenshots folder has been ravaged multiple times by catastrophic hard drive failures, but I believe this is Machiavellis Cat’s Heroic Twin Valks kill from somewhere in 2009. This makes me downright nostalgic. Other games may have better features and developers who are less creepy than Blizzard has been lately, but they will probably not have a dancing ogre in a loincloth.

I cropped this one so you could see guild chat, which is why I took the screenie. This was moments after creating our RIFT branch. The Cats have a long and terrifying history of comedy guild kicks. We can’t help it. We’re kind of jerks.

This one was just serendipity. The sixth image happened to be an amazing shot of Panacea, cyborg Operative.

This meme started as a WoW-centric one, but I care not for tradition! I’m tossing it over to my fellow SWTOR peeps Shintar, Njessi, and a woman who has the distinction of taking a million screenshots AND being my awesome evil-er twin (in spirit), Arolaide at Dragonsworn. Let’s see your SWTOR images!

Coming from WoW as a priest, my standards for appearance are pretty low; but can-opener gear?

Dailies and the rewards for doing them need some refinement. Controlling your appearance and mount would seem to be appropriate rewards. A stfu chip for the robot on my ship would be worth a couple weeks worth of dailies.